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PressTV – ‘US has zero leverage over Russia’

Eric Draitser, an American analyst, believes that US threats against Russia over Ukraine are “purely superficial” as Washington has no “leverage over Moscow.”

US Secretary of State John Kerry says Russia could be ousted from the Group of Eight (G8) developed nations over its deployment of troops in the restive Ukrainian region, warning that Moscow will suffer a loss of trade and investment if it does not retreat.

In a phone interview with Press TV on Sunday, Draitser said the “threats that the Obama administration is making are purely superficial at best.”

“We hear them talking about political isolation of Russia, economic sanctions possibly against certain Russian entities, also a laughable threat. They have absolutely zero leverage over Moscow considering the fact that Russia could simply turn off the gas to Europe and it would throw the entire continent into an uproar it would create chaos all throughout Europe ,” he noted.

Draitser went on to say that US actions concerning Russia are symptomatic of Washington’s double-standard and hypocrisy.

“It’s the height of hypocrisy for the United States to condemn Russia’s actions in east of Ukraine, the statements that you’ve heard from Secretary of State Kerry as well as from Obama himself all indicate that the United States is engaging in what George Orwell famously referred to as ‘doublethink,’ that is holding two contradictory views at the same time and believing both of them.”

“On the one hand, the United States condemns what it calls an intervention by President Putin and the Russian government into the east of Ukraine, into Russian cultural and historical territory of Crimea, but this is quite interesting considering the fact that this is the United States which engages in serial interventions all over the world on much flimsier pretexts. Let us not forget that there were no American military bases, there were no American citizens under threat in Libya. There were no American military bases under threat in Yugoslavia, in Iraq, in Somalia, or elsewhere and yet the United States found a pretext under the cover of so-called humanitarianism to engage in brutal and bloody interventions in each of those cases and many others.”

“All of a sudden the United States is up in arms citing international laws, citing the UN Charter and citing territorial integrity and sovereignty which is of course such an absurd and laughable accusation that it really requires incredible amount of self-deception to believe in it,” Draitser stated.